The Life-cycle of Eels
by Malebron
Summary: A millennia ago, Salazar learned to speak with the green, black and silver beasts that writhed and twisted in the marshes of his home, courted the peat-cutter's beautiful, silent daughter and was forced to flee from the cold iron of the Norman invaders. Inspired by the HPFC Greek Mythology Mega Prompt Challenge. Prompt; Hades; Write about Salazar Slytherin.


A short one-shot inspired by a prompt in the HPFC _Greek Mythology Mega Prompt Challenge;_

_**HADES; Write about Salazar Slytherin.**_

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**The Life-cycle of Eels**

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To the east of the country lies a land so low and flat that until the dykes were dug it lay partly under the ocean. The sky hangs wide and heavy, and scarifying winds sweep in from the North Sea.

There, more than a thousand years ago, Salazar lived in tall cloisters of stone on an island in the fens named for the silver, green and black beasts that writhed and twisted in the shallow marshes surrounding it.

He was a serious boy with argent eyes, and later a learned young man who studied the mysteries of the world around him both seen and unseen, and learned in time to speak with his friends in the ditches and dykes. As he travelled the shallow channels on a small, flat-bottomed boat, he asked them of their adventures, and they told him tales almost beyond belief; of the perilous journey they must make when they hunger to spawn,swimming without even stopping to feed, riding the back of the warm currents to an ancient and forgotten sea. And how the new-spawned young drift tiny, transparent, and directionless until the capricious waves wash them home.

And in the unforgiving fens, trees grew stunted and low and the willows and hazels were cut to the ground to grow withes for baskets and thatch. In a coppice there, amid the reeds and rushes, was a crude hut built of turf; the peat-cutter's shelter.

The peat-cutter was a lonely and taciturn man, for his wife had left him and returned to her sisters in the sea. But she left behind her own three daughters, though only one of them had human form.

And she was beautiful, the peat-cutter's daughter; slender, with skin that shone silver and with eyes as green as the moss that glowed viridian at dusk. But she was silent in the world of men and spoke only in the tongue of her mother and sisters.

Though the simple folk of the fens feared her and her lineage, holding them to blame for the shivering agues of the marshes, yet Salazar came again and again to pay court to her in the language of her kind, and in time she began to look upon him with favour.

Then came the armies of the Duke of Normandy, heavy with creaking armour and sharp with cold iron and anger. Who, though their victory was clearly writ in the skies, yet still hated witches, for they feared that which they did not understand. And they brought death and fire to the peat-cutter's house.

So Salazar and the peat-cutter's daughter fled, and as they left, tiny voices cried: _We are her sisters! Take us with you, we will guide you to a new home!_

The journey was long, and the sisters of the peat-cutter's daughter travelled alongside, swimming in the ditches, streams and rivers, and wriggling through the fields - always and ever to the north. And they called to him in sibilant voices: _This way! This way! We grow always closer!_

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Between the granite mountains and glacial lakes, the rocks are split with fissures and in the caves and hollows beneath live unremembered beasts from the time before the ice came. Far underground, the travellers found a cave with a pool immeasurably deep, fed by the freezing water that flowed through the clefts between the lochs.

And the sisters of the peat-cutter's daughter said:_ Here we will live and here we will stay, to watch over our sister and her children. Make our eyes strong, Salazar, that we may see in the deep, deep darkness; and change our nature so that we shall not crave return to our far distant spawning ground!_

And Salazar did as he was asked, and above the subterranean cavern he built a castle tall and strong, hidden with wards of power.

And the sisters of the peat-cutter's daughter moved through the fractures in the rocks until at last they grew too large to pass that way. Then one remained in the underground chamber and the other dwelt in an icy, fathomless lake where the water moved black and cloudy with the remains of primordial forests.

And the peat-cutter's beautiful daughter bore Salazar three children; two sons and a daughter who he called his _Slytherins._ And one of them had viridian eyes and could commune with the creatures who glided on their bellies over the land and under the water. And two had silver eyes and could not.

At the bottom of the purple mountains, in the cold, dark waters of the deep lake they call _Ness, _the last sister of the peat-cutter's beautiful daughter is patient; she waits.

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End file.
